AI gender equity meaning is likely to be one of the meanings that will dissipate into buzziness.
Key important happenings informed by my recent research, as well as the past and current policy and practice discourses;
👉🏾 STEM has been predominantly male dominated industry, which poses a challenge in developing tools and services that cater for needs that are specific for women and girls, and/or consider their unique needs when creating and deploying AI solutions.
👉🏾 Systemic-sponsored unequal power relations, whether in professional fields or in communities, create barriers for women and girls, who have to depend on the good will and occupy the limited space created for them by those who own and control resources.
👉🏾 AI can discriminate women and girls by creating a barrier to unequal access to services, employment, financial assets, or better clinical decisions.
👉🏾 A narrow focus on skilling and/or increasing number of women in AI spaces, musks the nuanced power dynamics within those spaces. From my research this was observable in the way power and control of resources and design spaces is shared in AI development and deployment spaces(particularly in agriculture).
👉🏾 The policy tools are not helping this discourse either, as gender equity keeps getting obscured in broad statements like inclusivity, responsible AI, and ethical AI.
Isn't it time we start critically deconstructing these terms and meanings one by one?
👉🏾 I want to re-use the words of Amartya Sen, in his coined word "Missing women", despite focusing on gender mortality. In the next few decades more than a billion women may be missing literary and/or figuratively, due to their narrowed space to harness the power of AI economies, as well as the deep seated unaddressed systemic issues that create barriers different layers of women in the society.
Co-creating AI with communities, especially women calls for important terms and meanings to be co-defined, in policy and practice, while keenly focusing on the power dynamics that may limit some groups from participating in these discussions.
She doesn't have to watch from the margins, she can be part of the conversation.
#ai #genderequity #agtech #cocreating #aiethics #responsibleai
